[aroman]

I agree Canonical should stick to their core, but it's not the desktop. It's cloud.

They've demonstrated they do not have what it takes to make desktop net profitable for them.

They make most of their money by selling support for their cloud stuff — this is what they should focus on. Desktop has done nothing but lose them money.

[toddan]

I think Canonical should focus on the cloud and developers. At the moment most of the ones using Ubuntu are developers and Canonical should focus on producing a complete package with a nice and integrated development experience all the way from the could to the developer desktop.

[tormeh]

Well, Canonical could always make their own laptops with perfect driver support and charge a premium for that. I don't know why they're not. As of right now the only laptops that consistently work well with Linux/Ubuntu are Thinkpads and Thinkpads suck for e.g. gaming. No one except Microsoft can make money selling an OS - and they can only do it because they have a massive advantage in user training and software ecosystem. They tried to sue their way to victory with Phone, but have eventually settled for the fact that they'll have to sell hardware as well.

[tealeg]

Note that as of late both Apple and Microsoft are making moves towards "the OS is free" for certain markets. I hear tell that Microsoft are even paying OEMs to put Windows on phones.